Whispering softly...

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/6/6/1947074/Smyrni%20me%20ta%20perihora%20%28Pandelidi%29%201930.mp3

http://youtu.be/huG8E3_pO-s

"Smyrna with your suburbs" (1930), S. Pandelidis, singer Georgia Mittaki

LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats 

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock "

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

About women (Oples, koukles, panoukles...)...

Opla -es (syn. opa) = exclamation

Koukla - es = doll - metaforically, babe, sweetheart

Panoukla -es = plaguee, pest - metaforically, 1.very ugly woman/2. hard, tough, awkaward, complicated

"Oples, koukles, panoukles", three rhyming words used as an exclamation in a couple of Mikrasiatiko songs. They were said as a joke, and for "praising a hymn" to womens beauty. At the same time the third word panoukla is reminding of the problems a woman causes to men.

According to Hesiod "The immortals who lived on Mount Olympus created first the golden race of mankind. Those people lived as gods, without care, pain and sorrows. They were long-lived and not getting old. They died like if they fell asleep..."

Jean Pierre Vernant in his "Feminine figures of Death in Greece" writes , "at that time there were not existing any women(before Pandoras creation) and not Death either. Living like gods together with gods, the men of the golden race were unchangeable during their life and they were covered by something similar to a sweet sleep, instead of death. Death and woman appeared simultaneously...

If we think of a usual company of 5-6 masculine people playing rebetiko songs, I can assure you that they are not missing at all a feminine presence. Τhey are enjoyning themselves, the are competing of reaching the highest tones, they look at each other with a mutual understanding when they sing verses having ambiguous meanings about women. A feminine voice splits up, especially when there is an audience because the eyes are turns to her and that irritates the bouzouki player who likes to play the role of the mortal god who is admired for the way he plays though he mostly do it in the same way with all others.

Rebetiko was and still is a masculine affair, a magic masculine orgasm...

If somebody claims that women were regarded as a secondary accessory they look surprised at you like if you had claimed that the sheap's usual colour is the phosphoric orange...

The following verses of Kaldaras song "A widow in the tavern" (1955 or 19579), "a woman has not the same value as two guys", where the noun woman is regarded a something alien compared tguys refers to an established attitude in the collective subconscious all over the earth. Especially in Greece is extremely emphasized.

Let us see a fragment from Markos Vamvakaris autobiography dictated for Angela Kail (Athens, 1973) : "...Moushoundis (i.e. police chief in Thessaloniki who liked rebetiko and its people) when he saw me said to the police who brought me there, "come here", he said, "did you ask him who he is? - Yes. Didn't you tell me to fetch here the human being (άνθρωπος) and the woman who was there? I fetched him. I don't remember what happenned with the woman...".

Ιn the original text we read the word άνθρωπος (= human being) which is a masculine in Greek as in, perhaps, in all languages, except Swedish where it is feminine(!). The word άνθρωπος is explained with the word man. It is obvious that we have a contradiction between άνθρωπος and woman. Woman is not an άνθρωπος... Α similar example is the contradiction (still existing in Greek) between the word φαντάρος ( = soldier) and άνθρωπος. Τhey are typical exaples of symbols carried in everyday language. We don't bother using them but they form an unconscious ideology.

(to be continued)

Do you know who Nouros is?

elkibra-Nouros.blogspot.com

AMALIA VAKA

This article is copied from http://maviboncuk.blogspot.com and written by David Soffa, Berkeley, 2002

Amalia Baka
Mavi Boncuk Amalia! Old Greek Songs in the New Land 1923-1950




Three days after her 15th birthday, traveling by herself on the The Kaiser Franz Josef I, Mazaltov (Mally) Matsa of Janina, Turkey, steamed toward the new land. Two weeks shy of a year later she married Jack Saretta, a fellow from her hometown, and set up housekeeping on Rivington Street in New York's Lower East Side, a short walk from the New York Janina Synagogue. She had work as a seamstress and he made silk flowers for lady's hats.

The Janina she left in 1912 was diverse, fractious, complicated, multinational and multicultural, in many ways similar to New York. Romaniote Jews had lived in Janina for about 1,800 years. Life for Mally had been strictly defined by that tradition. In the Romaniote community, girls were born to a servile position in a male-dominated world, their births not recorded, their early education limited to that which would best serve their future husbands, and their worth reckoned in the end by the number of male children they might bear. A Rornaniote girl was kept at home until her father chose a husband for her. When she married, she was sent to live in the home of her new husband.

Mally's marriage was certainly arranged before she left Janina. The home she made in the new land was intended to continue the old ways. The enumerator for the 1920 census found Mally and Jack with two daughters, Diamond and Esther Cleoniki, named after their grandmothers in the Romaniote tradition. The old ways had a good foothold on New York's Lower East Side, although for Mally the pressures and freedoms to be found on foreign shores had shaped changes even before she landed. She had traveled by herself on the Kaiser Franz Josef I, an immense modern ocean liner, only months from its own maiden voyage (actually the largest ship ever to fly the Austrian flag). At Ellis Island she was detained because she did not have the $50 in cash required of new immigrants; after a phone call she was sponsored by her Aunt Rachel. Life in New York demanded money, so Mally got a job sewing in a factory.

Circumstance had forced her to accept a level of responsibility and independence forbidden Romaniote girls in Janina, and with it came opportunities that were also customarily denied. In Janina, Mally lived within Jewish, Greek, and Turkish cultures, and threads of each are woven through her songs. About the only public or semi-public activity that Romaniote women could engage in was the keening of laments at the time of death. Romaniote religious ceremony is conducted in demotic, that is, everyday spoken Greek, instead of Hebrew, and Romaniote singing also borrowed traditional Greek melodies. The memory of these songs and laments was deeply instilled, and they would always be an important part of Mally's repertoire. Mally sang all her life.

Her talent for singing was "discovered" when she sang in the factory where she sewed, or when she sang while hanging up her laundry. Both stories are probably true. She sang in Greek and Turkish, and by the early 1920s had begun singing professionally as Amalia in Greek cafe-amans and Turkish clubs. Her first recordings were eight Turkish songs for the M. G. Parsekian Record Company, across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey; then in Chicago, she recorded six Greek and Turkish songs for the Greek Record Company of George Gretsis and Spiros Stamos. Amalia's independent spirit and emerging career caused trouble at home. In the old country, women who sang in clubs were considered prostitutes- fallen women at best.

Jack divorced her, and Cleoniki was sent to live in Greece ("kidnapped", Diamond says). In 1926 Mally converted to the Greek Othodox Church in order to marry Gus Bakas, and continued recording as Amalia Baka from 1927 to 1929. Gus worked in the restaurant business, and Amalia was herself involved in clubs and restaurants, both as owner and as headline entertainment. Live performances in Turkish clubs, cafe-amans and restaurants were the mainstay of Amalia's singing career. She was always working, according to her daughter, Diamond, who from the beginning was with her at recording sessions and on stage, playing doumbek, encouraging her with "Ya sou, Mitera! " ("your health, mother!") and sometimes singing duets with her. Cafe-amans were lively and numerous in Prohibition-era New York. Entertainment, atmosphere and booze were a magic combination, and dozens flourished around Eighth and Ninth Avenues at 33rd and 34th Streets, packed with people from all parts of the city. Amalia opened her own club, the Cafe-Aman Pavsilipon, with, as Diamond remembers, "- a few tables and a bottle of bootleg booze ... little by little they were coming in ... the priest came in, too."

Amalia did not record in the 1930s, but traveled quite a bit, often with singer George Katsaros, and sang at clubs, restaurants, and resorts in an informal circuit that included New York, the Catskills and Finger Lakes areas of New York, and cities with large Greek populations such as Detroit, Chicago, Gary (Indiana) and Philadelphia.

By 1940 Amalia and Diamond were living in Chicago, and Amalia was involved with a club/restaurant, the Pantheon, near Halsted Street in the heart of "the Delta," Chicago's old Greektown. Chicago Greek restaurants were also bars and nightclubs, social watering holes with live entertainment, cadres of regulars and many stories. Amalia was a spirited and memorable participant who helped lead the charge for about two decades and is still remembered with fondness and awe. "If she didn't like you, chairs would fly", recalled John Katsikas, a cymbalon and samtouri player who accompanied Amalia.

Her performance of "Bahaiotiko," a slow dirge, is remembered still, as is her prowess at poker and barbuti dice. To a patron who needed money to get married she gave a gold ring from her own finger, "and she would swear like a man". In the early 1940s Amalia was recording again, this time for Ajdin AsIlan's MeRe/ Balkan/ Gadinis/ Kalaphone/ Metropolitan family of labels in New York, in which she also had part ownership. Her recording sessions in New York were with luminaries such as clarinetists Gus Gadinis, John Pappas and John Dalas, kanounists Garbis Bakirgian and Theodore Kappas, and violinists Alexis Zervas and Nick Doneff.

During World War II Greek music in the United States saw a revival of songs and styles that had originated or were popular in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the time of the influx of ethnic Greek refugees from Turkey into Greece as part of the 1922 League of Nations relocations. Over a third of Amalia's recordings from this period were old songs from her own or from pioneer Greek vocalist Coula Antonopoulos's early recorded repertoire. Mostly laments or songs that expressed resilience in the face of troubles, they offered some solace to expatriates horrified at the fate of Greece and their families and friends there during World War II.

Amalia retired in the early 1960s. Chicago's redevelopment efforts had removed the heart of Greektown to make way for the University of Illinois Chicago campus, and Amalia's home and the restaurants and clubs she sang in were destroyed. Diamond had moved to Florida in 1960 and opened the New Hellas restaurant in Tarpon Springs, close to where the sponge boats docked. Amalia followed in 1974, moving to New Port Richie, just north of the docks. Amalia died in 1979. Her obituary did not mention that she was a singer, that one of the most fluid and evocative of Greek voices had been stilled.

Amalia lived and sang with great passion. Though her repertoire was very traditional she made her songs her own by comments and ad libs while singing, by changing words, and by using songs to show what was happening in her life. She wrote "Elenitsa Mou" when she was baptized, taking the baptismal name Eleni, and she wrote and sang "Diamontoula Mou" for her daughter Diamond. Unlike her contemporaries Marika Papagika and Coula Antonopoulos, she did not sing much of the world of hash, manges and rebetes- most of her recorded songs are about love. In her long experience singing for live audiences in the small clubs she developed a very personal and intimate style. She understood and exploited the subtleties of the electric microphone from its first years in the recording medium to bring a palpable closeness and immediacy to her recordings.

Remarkable within ordinary circumstances, her story is almost incredible when her own background is considered. Uprooted and cast to sea on a floating skyscraper to make her way in a boisterous and challenging world, she responded with an indomitable, creative and generous spirit that is still left in her songs.

David Soffa, Berkeley, 2002

Υou, evil witch / Μάγισσα κακιά

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/6/6/1947074/Magissa%20kakia%20%28Toundas%29%201930.mp3

Darkness from within a voice...

Towards a new way to approach Rebetiko

Kostas Masselos (Nouros) (1892-1972)

It took me a lot of years up to the moment a searchlight turned on inside me and I could realize that my roots from Asia Minor had shadowed secretly the biggest part of my life. As an example, I could not understand before why I always had felt as a stranger on the Cycladic islands, which I admire so much. On the contrary, every time the boat was passing or came to anchor to islands of the Eastern Aegean sea, I was feeling something warm flowing inside me. Like if I had come home to a familiar landscape but I could not understand the reason why.

I have to notice that I never heard a word from my father and his relatives, as long as they lived, about their hometown Izmir and likewise nobody, from my mother´s side, had ever explained why one of four inhabitants of Thessalonica, my hometown, suddenly had disappeared when the Germans came to town.

The catalyst which put the first searchlight on was the moment I listened to Rita Abadzi’s warm breathes in the remarkably fine CD “Rita Abadzi 1933-1938”, Heritage.
The second searchlight was the re-discovering of Kostas Masselos (Nouros).

The moist sound of his nickname Nouros twirled round in my mind. I was trying to find the, unknown to me, origin of this word. I could not find it in Turkish lexicons and not in Spanish. I asked a man from Argentina, I thought it could come from the French noir (black). No result. All of a sudden, I met a Syrian girl coming from Turkey and she gave me the answer. Nuro in Syrian means, fire.

I had imagined instinctively something like that because from the “black” and soft like velvet voice of this man comes out a burning breath which do not singe but touches you carelessly with flames which do not burn.

Nouros had an inward voice, not outward as, for example, Vangelakis Sofroniou. You go into ecstasy though he does not lift you up in the sky as Dalgas did or Stratos Payioumtzis. Nouros does not break your heart as Mitsos Atraidis can do, but he takes you into half dark, melancholic, mysterious and monastic rooms. He softens your soul and throws you on downy pillows, while you feel like breathing perfumed smoke in phosphoric colours.
s
Nouros voice had a duende*1. It was not a gothic demon, it was of another short from Asia Minor, in a blue violet colour, like the inner side of sea-shells. But from one moment to another his demon could change appearance. He then got a dark grey colour, a shining and metallic surface, like an oyster, with squeaking scales, as if every one of them had its own life.

His duende was volcanic but with en inward activity. It was passionate but covered with a veil of calm, granite old Greek dignity. This oblong demon, looking like an eel, was fastened on Nouros and enticed him into masculine lovers.

His duende concealed him with an undefined and unsatisfied melancholy. That one which never reveals when and how you have been loved from all those who walked besides you, slept with you, been photographed with you, or if they did it because of other hidden reasons. That melancholy which accompanies you through all your life and leads to an old age, keeping you half-drowned into seas of wonderings and dubious memories. The same melancholy which was standing besides him under the night lights of the music places where the customers were longing for the black and waving sounds coming out from his mouth.
Because his voice was moving in spirals, “folding” and ”unfolding” from his larynx’s contractions and the ups and downs of his lower jaw.

Everybody had something nice to say about Nouros good heart. In his few photos he looks serious, mysterious and distant. Perhaps, those who have met him got a different opinion, but there is something in his sad eyes that makes me think so.

Closed to the end of “Tabahana mané” (1931)*2 he makes something fantastic with his voice, covering with nimbus clouds of envy (?) the heart of the magic but egoistic Stellakis Perpiniadis who was present during the recording. Stellakis opened his mouth and spat out this “unexpected”, rigid and frozen comment: ”drop dead, faggot!”

Duende and the choosen human being are living together as two different entities. Duende decides to whom it will stay and how long, enlightening and torturing. The human being is like a feather which leds away by the wind,though duende has a stable and callous substance. The meaning of right and wrong, good and evil are stabilised and definitely balanced. Duende never pets, it only becomes frantic.

Nouros got perhaps not sorrowed or annoyed by Stellaki’s comment (ask his heart for being sure…) but duende does not forgive or accept stupidity. It became livid, lifted up its scales but its anger evaporated within a second. It took back its sea-shell colour and forced Nouros to smile and answer in a happy-go-lucky way.

The comment “drop dead, faggot” contains a couple of words which give en electric shock to each other and we ought to approach them in two different ways. According to the concept of that time (1930΄s) and the today’s one. The 1930’s was a totally different time compared to 2000’s.
The World War 1 and the defeat in Asia Minor were fresh in people’s mind. Death was like a well-known visitor. On the other hand, men have always had a tough way when they’re joking and the codes inside Rebetiko esnaf ”permitted” similar word games.
No matter what Stellakis Perpiniadis had in mind his comment sounds sharp. One can see it as wickedness or envy for Nouros’ voice. Those two men knew each other well and Stellakis appreciated Nouros and admired him, something that he did not use to do. But at that moment threw an arrow and hit Nouros in his Achilles’ heel.

People within Rebetiko were not angels. Nevertheless, some of them were very special and sensitive in another way. It is my belief that Nouros was one of them and that the verses of ”Ηouzam mane”*3 give his stigma:

Whoever has a blackened heart, let’s stay together
wander the wastelands and hide ourselves from the world’s gaze.

Nouro´s voice offers consolation.
Rebetiko is a music for consolation.

Vasilis Tsitsanis, another extremely sensitive man, says in a verse of the song “Gipsy, break up the violin”:

I did not come here tonight to amuse myself,
I just came to get consolation…

During the last years before his death and while his duende was counting the last pearls of his life, Tsitsanis used to greet his public by saying, “ala, alania!” but at the same time, he was somewhere else. His customers were dancing “empty” and exhibitionistic zeibekiko dances, but he was somewhere else, because the bridges had been cut and the leaves had left the trees…

*1 duende = New Oxford Dictionary: 1. ghost, evil spirit/2. inspiration, magic, fire – Random house Dictionary: 1. demon, spirit/fascination, magnetism.

No matter if duende is a spirit or a demon it cannot be described and being bottled…


Kostas Ladopoulos (2009)

The sinnful (Η αμαρτωλή)

I've always believed that rebetiko songs (thorax's songs) are, in different ways, sincere confessions of, not only deep love but mainly, masculine weakness...

I give you here a simple and melancholic example of Stavros Kaloumenos (whom we know nothing more than that he lived in the States and recorded there), undet the title "The sinnful".

Here is the text:


I don't want to go to Paradise when I'll die
'cause I know I won't find you there
and then, what Am I going to do?

I'd like to go to Hell, I'm asking for this favour,
'cause I'm going to meet you there, you sinnful, I know it

Yala,

Because you never showed some mercy, during your life,
do a good deed and love me just a bit

Yala,

You sinnful, you're going to burn and melt in Hell's fire.
It's no use, you cruel, if you regret.
I don't care if I melt together with you in Hell
and being with the devils, if I only can see you.

Together with the deads and the devils,
there won't be any difference,
'cause even during my life I was together with a devil, poor me.

Yala,
oples,
Yia sou Stavro!

Here is the song. Enjoy it!


http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/6/6/1947074/16_Stavros_Kaloumenos_-_I_Amartoli.mp3